Isle of Dogs - dir Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson is known for creating movies that feature his unique quirky, signature style. His last outing The Grand Budapest Hotel was a brilliant example of Anderson's willingness to experiment where he used, of all things matte painting, as set backdrops to realise his vision. If you thought he couldn't get crazier than that wait till you see Isle of Dogs, which is a stop motion animation film set in the future, based on dogs and ostensibly filmed in entirely in Japanese.

The story is set in the fictional town of Megasaki City in Japan where an outbreak of dog flu has caused the corrupt mayor Kobayashi to exile all the cities dogs to Trash Island, a huge dumping ground for the cities waste of the coast. We follow the adventures of a boy called Atari on his search for his missing dog, along the way he befriends a pack of exiled dogs voiced by an exceptional cast (Bryan Cranston, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Jeff Goldblum and Bob Balaban) who accompany him across Trash Island.

This film goes to some dark places, if you are expecting a cheery Disney like fun animation this is not it. During its runtime we visit some disturbing themes from abandonment, animal experimentation through to mass euthanasia. However Anderson's whimsical charm is sprinkled throughout never letting the film hit Watership Down levels of morbidity and it remains highly entertaining throughout

But the real remarkable feature of this movie is that it is effectively a foreign language film. All the human characters primarily speak Japanese, the majority of written words are in Japanese. Yet somehow Wes Anderson has managed to seamlessly make it possible to watch as an English speaker without using subtitles through the clever use of interpreter characters, on screen prompts and an intern student. It helps of course that the dogs all speak English but even so the way it is done is incredibly clever and really adds to the aesthetic of the movie.

When you add in the stop motion animation on top you have a deeply ambitious film which with its excellent deadpan humour, great voice acting and engaging plot is a real masterpiece when seemingly a dogs dinner would have been a more likely outcome.

Must Go.